1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to editing systems for voice recognition and, more particularly, to a system and method for editing messages transcribed from speech from a telephone.
2. Description of the Related Art
Advances in personal communications in recent years have led to information being transmitted through a variety of channels to users, for instance speech, multi-media (figures and speech), text (e-mail, pagers), etc. Due to these advances, there has arisen the concept of unified whereby the messages received by a user through various media are stored in a single repository and can be retrieved or searched by the user at his/her convenience. Further, it may be the case that the user has only a personal digital assistant (PDA) with very limited capabilities through which to retrieve his messages. In general however, even the simplest of PDA's will support the reception of text, though it may not support the reception of multimedia signals. Consequently, it may be necessary to convert speech and multimedia signals into text so that the signals can be easily accessed. This also has implications on the bandwidth requirements for communication--text signals require less bandwidth than speech for transmission.
Voicemail is a commonly used messaging system wherein the speech of a person is recorded and subsequently played back by the recipient of the message. Hence, an important component of unified messaging is the capability to convert such messages into text. This can of course be done by using automatic speech recognition algorithms. However, voicemail messages typically represent spontaneous speech recorded over an unknown (the caller who is leaving the message may be halfway around the earth or next door) telephone bandwidth channel, and hence represent a very challenging task for automatic speech recognition systems. there is the danger of the transcribed text being so full of errors that the recipient of the message may not be able to decipher the message at all. Hence, it is advantageous to incorporate some form of feedback mechanism whereby the person leaving the message can check the quality of the transcription and correct it if necessary.
Therefore, a need exists for an interactive system and method for converting speech data into text and incorporating the feature of correction of the transcribed text by voice.